California Foodways

It’s said that date palm trees want their feet in water, and their heads in fire. It makes sense, then that more than 90% of the dates harvested in the U.S. grow in California’s Eastern Coachella Valley. Irrigation water’s pumped here from the Colorado River, and summer temperatures can top 120 degrees. I spent some time in the Eastern Coachella Valley recently, and got curious about the history o...

Tourists to the Napa Valley may visit their favorite exclusive wineries and fine dining restaurants. But locals love a more humble dish called malfatti. It’s a little spinach and cheese dumpling, shaped like a pinky finger and smothered in sauce. The most famous malfatti in the region is found in the back of Val’s Liquor in the city of Napa. The story of how that came to pass involves Napa's deep...

Members of the military are often deployed or stationed far away from their extended families. When military families make friends, they often move. Those are facts of life for many military families in many military towns. There’s a place in San Diego, though, where active duty service members, their spouses and kids can always share a meal with their extended military family: the USO Downtown Ce...

Trinity County is one of those places that doesn’t get in the news much, unless it’s for marijuana or wildfires. It’s a beautiful, remote, rural part of northern California. It’s also one of the state’s most food insecure places, where many people don’t know where their next meal is coming from. In this story, I join the county's food bank director on his 10+ hour food delivery to the most isolate...

For this story, I visited a factory, a kind of factory I'd never seen before. I got suited up in safety gear -- smock, rubber gloves, a hair net -- not to protect me, but to protect the product made here. It's in almost every convenience store, college dorm, school cafeteria, and in thousands of family freezers around the country: the frozen burrito. I went to Dinuba, in the Central Valley, to mee...

Are you worried about water cutbacks during this dry year? Try farming…without irrigation, relying only on rainwater. But lots of crops like wheat and grapes are “dry farmed” across the state. There are tomatoes on the Central Coast, squash in Humboldt, and walnuts in San Luis Obispo County, which is where we go for this story about dry farming advocate Jutta Thoerner.

If you’ve read your John Steinbeck and listened to your Merle Haggard, or if you grew up in a farmworker family, you know that farm laborers in California have struggled to find decent housing for decades. Except in a few cases, growers have no legal obligation to house employees, and there’s not a lot of state and federal money earmarked for farmworker housing. In the Salinas Valley — the fifth-...

Who doesn’t like a treasure hunt?  The search for something mysterious and valuable, with just a few clues to guide you…it’s pretty irresistible. For this episode, I take you back a few years to introduce you to a Nevada County man who spent the last years of his life on a hunt for remnants of the Gold Rush…just not the kind you might expect.

I've met some amazing people reporting for California Foodways. At the end of 2020, I learned that some of those people passed away. KQED's California Report Magazine invited me to talk with host Sasha Khokha about three food pioneers, and remind us of their legacies.

At Damburger in Redding, each burger patty is so thin, it gets crispy on the edges. It's never, ever served with a tomato. The Damburger original’s a signature item the burger joint's been making since the 1930s, when it helped fuel one of the most impactful engineering feats in the state’s history — the Shasta Dam — by nourishing the workers who came to build it.

“Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions, and more!” That’s the actual motto for the California Conservation Corps, the state program that puts young adults to work outdoors. In Marin County, they have the tough job of building and maintaining world-class trails. I spent a rainy night with the "Cs" to learn about the role food plays for a crew of young people burning thousands of calories a day.....

The coronavirus brings back memories of another public health crisis, where the federal government was slow to respond and communities had to take care of each other: the AIDS epidemic. One woman who became an unexpected caregiver is Meridy Volz. Starting in the 1970s, she ran a bakery called Sticky Fingers Brownies. "The business changed," Meridy says. "It went from something fun and lightweight...

So far this year, wildfires have burned more than 4 million acres in California. That’s more than double the previous record.  I thought it might be a good time to hear a story I reported from Calaveras County. In 2015, after it was devastated by the Butte Fire, a group of farmers and ranchers worked to rehabilitate their land... and their community.

Last month a parade drew over 80,000 people to the Sacramento Valley. Before any floats passed, people in colorful clothing and turbans sprinkled water on the street and swept the concrete, cleansing the route. They were celebrating a holiday of the Sikh faith: the 500-year old religion from India's Punjab region. This gathering in Yuba City is the largest of its kind in the U.S., because Sikhs ha...

Jackson is a Gold Rush-era town with quaint brick buildings on its Main Street, and a reputation as the last of its kind to get rid of brothels and gaming halls. It’s pretty quiet, now, except when you walk into Rosebud's Cafe. It’s a place that shouts its values from its walls: bright green paint, huge family portraits, and tons of posters and flyers announcing programs for the arts, supporting l...

There’s just something about cherries. They’re small, sweet and crunchy, with an early harvest that tells us summer’s coming. Right now, though, this beloved fruit is a bit of a canary in a coal mine. Since the drought, experts have looked to cherry harvests for warnings about climate change and its impact on future tree crops.

What do Jimmy Buffett, Jay-Z and Kenny Rogers have in common? They’ve all parlayed their fame to sell food, in restaurants and chains. In Orange County, there’s a banh mi sandwich shop run by Lynda Trang Dai, a Vietnamese pop star who’s as comfortable behind the stove as she is behind the microphone.

The Valley Fire that hit Lake County in September, 2015 was one of the most destructive in California history. The hills here, once thick with pines and firs, now look like a moonscape with trees. This is just the environment that draws mushroom hunters who ‘chase the burns' in search of the black morel mushrooms that grow in the springtime after a forest fire.

You might expect the winners of a California high school culinary competition to come from one of the state's restaurant destinations like Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Sonoma County. In March of 2017, though, top prize went to tiny Greenville High School in Plumas County.

If you ask people in the city of Mexicali, Mexico about their most notable regional cuisine, they won’t say street tacos or mole, They’ll say Chinese food. Just north of the border in Imperial County, the population’s mostly Latino, but Chinese restaurants are super popular, too. I went to discover the history behind some dishes you won’t find anywhere else.

Between Sacramento and Redding, Highway 5 cuts through the middle of rice country. In the town of Willows, right next to rice fields, there's a one-of-a-kind restaurant that's popular with travelers, farmers, truckers, and pilots: Nancy's Airport Cafe.

On this Day of Remembrance, here's a story about Japanese Americans in California. Japanese Americans have been particularly vocal in opposition to President Trump proposed Muslim ban and Muslim registry. They have long memories of being incarcerated during World War II in what were called “relocation” or “internment camps” over 75 years ago. For this story, I joined a busload of people traveling...

Jim and Mary Rickert came together because of cows. They met and fell in love at Cal Poly. Within a decade, they were managing a ranch just below the Oregon border in Siskiyou County. It was a struggle. But their lives -- and the business -- changed when they got a really weird offer, and they said yes.

Merced County is California’s sweet potato capital. In this story, co-reporter Angela Johnston and I meet a sweet potato farming family that’s facing a crisis that could wreak havoc on the entire agricultural industry. It weighs 20-pounds, has orange bucked teeth, and can eat a quarter of its body weight a day.

The Capay Valley is pretty serene, except for the cacophony inside its most lucrative business: the Cache Creek Casino. Up to 2,000 visitors a night swell the valley’s population and traffic, causing tension between local farmers and the tiny tribe that runs it. In this story we ask: do farming and gambling mix?